Publication

IAM recently covered AT&T’s increased activity in the secondary patent market, with Lyft, Uber and Facebook among the companies that have purchased its assets. The telecoms giant has a significant portfolio – in terms of volume and quality – which has attracted a number of businesses looking to bolster their own holdings.

Occasionally, we hear people say, “brokered patents are all junk.” This begs the question, “are operating companies and non-practicing entities (NPEs) spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying junk patents?” Luckily, the short answer is no. We know clients have successfully bought and used brokered patents to substantially alter their licensing and litigation posture at a lower cost than the alternatives. We also know that patents on the brokered market rank higher than average patents (See “Finding the Best Patents — Forward Citation Analysis Still Wins”, by Oliver, et al.). So why this disconnect? We are victims of our own cognitive biases and the behavioral economic traps that make it harder for buyers to find and buy patents.

Tim Freestone explores why the growth in intellectual property and patent risks has not been matched by a corresponding growth in insurance. Tim interviews industry veterans including Kent Richardson on patent infringement insurance opportunities.

“Finding a Role for Insurance in a Technology-Driven Economy.” Freestone. InsuranceERM (July 2018), available here.

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court issued decisions in both Oil States v. Green Energy and SAS Institute v. Iancu. In Oil States the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of inter partes review (see here, here and here). In SAS Institute, a 5-4 majority ruled that there is no authorization in the statute for the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to partially institute a petition for inter partes review. Thus, the Supreme Court held that when the Patent Office institutes an inter partes review it must decide the patentability of all of the claims the petitioner has challenged.

To provide instant reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in SAS Institute we’ve reached out to an All-Star panel of industry experts for their take on this important decision. Their analysis follows.

“SAS: When the Patent Office Institutes IPR It Must Decide Patentability of All Challenged Claims.” Quinn et. al. IPWatchdog (April 2018), available here.

Earlier today the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Oil States v. Green Energy, finding that inter partes review is constitutional both under Article III and the Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution. In a 7-2 decision, the Court determined that patents are a government franchise that are subject to review by the Patent Office even after granting, and can be revoked at any time.

10,000+ patents, spending $10M’s per year, cross-licenses, and license potential with dozens of companies, what’s the value of the portfolio to the business? Is your patent strategy valuable to your company? How? OK, tag you are it, what is the answer? The problem seems intractable. In previous articles, we have discussed how to determine your general patent risk and how to put a number on it. But where do you start when you are trying to estimate the value of your patent strategy?

Changes in how you watch movies, stream TV and use video chat are on the way. These will fundamentally affect the economics of how content is delivered to you, as well as the way that the patents underpinning the enabling technology are licensed.

The article from ROL looks at which patent owners have signed up as licensors to each pool, details how many patents they have on offer and royalty rates which are a combination of publicly available figures and, for Velos, the authors’ own estimates. The analysis pegs the handset royalty rate covered by the main pools at $1.60 which is increased to $2.25 when unaffiliated patent owners (which include Nokia and Microsoft) are included. As the article points out, that represents a royalty of 1.1% for a handset with an average sales price of $200. By way of comparison for 4G LTE technology the cumulative royalty per phone has been estimated to be $7.25.

We explore how you can model the expected cost and revenue of your ongoing cross-licensing negotiations to make it easier to prioritize your activities, and how doing that helps you run your cross-licensing program like a business.